More than 24 hours after The Irrawaddy deleted a story from its website after it was proved to be fake, Myanmar’s Ministry of Information shared the same story in a last-grasp attempt to pass it off as genuine.
On Monday, The Irrawaddy’s Myanmar-language site published a story titled “Weapons plundered from Bangladeshi refugee camp guards,” which describes a raid by armed attackers on a security post at a Rohingya refugee camp in southern Bangladesh. The attackers stole 11 rifles and 570 rounds of ammunition and killed one Bangladeshi security guard.
The Irrawaddy claimed the attack took place on October 13, 2017, but they deleted the story when netizens revealed that the same exact story first came out 17 months ago.
The Irrawaddy’s Myanmar-language editor Ye Ni told Coconuts: “It was a mistake. The regional desk translated it as they thought it was in October 2017. When we realized that was an old story, we took it down.”
They even posted a public apology for the “mistake.”
Before the story was deleted, it was shared widely on social media pages, prompting comments about the threat of “Bengali terrorists.” Even former information minister Ye Htut, who was a vocal denier of the Rohingya identity during his tenure, shared the story with his thousands of followers before eventually deleting it.
Myanmar’s propaganda machine, unfortunately, has not gotten the memo. State-run newspaper The Mirror and the Ministry of Information’s Facebook page both shared the story this morning, claiming the attack was carried out last week and citing The Irrawaddy as a source. Each post has been shared dozens of times.
Several commenters pointed out the fake information, but the posts remain online as of Wednesday at noon.
The Irrawaddy was long considered Myanmar’s most trustworthy news source and was a key player in the popular struggle for democracy. However, its editorial slant has steadily been converging with that of Myanmar’s state-run media since the Rohingya insurgent group ARSA attacked dozens of police stations in northern Rakhine State on August 25, triggering the Myanmar army’s displacement of over 580,000 Rohingya civilians.
Before the ARSA attacks, The Irrawaddy referred to Rohingya as “Rohingya” in English and as “Bengali” in Burmese. After the attacks, it began referring to them in English only as “self-identifying Rohingya.”
Several of the outlet’s employees have resigned since the new policy was introduced.
A report published by the Myanmar Institute for Democracy last week found that The Irrawaddy’s coverage of the first two weeks of the Rakhine crisis “mainly relied on the news released by the Information Committee, the Sate Counsellor Office, the President Office, and the Chief of Defense Office.”
